Food & Beverage
Suspended dining areas, triple drive-thru lanes move into Burger King next year
Burger King just landed a whopper of a store redesign that it said will begin being built next year.
September 3, 2020
Miami-based Burger King has created a whopper redesign focused on the mobile customer and speed of delivery. The renderings mirror an airport landing field with a multitude of drive-thru, order and pickup lanes. One reimagining even puts the physical dine-in restaurant space atop the drive-thru lanes, according to a news release.
"In March our in-house design and tech team accelerated new restaurant design plans and pushed the limits of what a Burger King restaurant could be," Josh Kobza, COO of Restaurant Brands International, parenat company of Burger King, said in the release. "We took into consideration how consumer behaviors are changing and our guests will want to interact with our restaurants. The result is a new design concept that is attractive to guests and will allow our franchisees to maximize their return."
Created by the Restaurant Brands International in-house design group, the plans were drafted with input from tech, operations and food innovation teams to heighten Burger King's customer experience. The pair of store designs provide multiple ordering and delivery modes in a 60% smaller footprint than traditional BK outlets.
The reimagined restaurant blueprints emphasize:
- Drive-Thru. The renewed importance of drive-thru access brought on by the pandemic is over-the-top in the execution of Burger King's new design, which feature double or triple drive-thru channels augmented by digital menu boards and merchandising. But this mobile customer allotment does more than speed ordering and pickup, since it also features what the brand calls a "living wall" to frame guests' views of the store's kitchen with those BK broilers, as well as an external walk-up window on the glass facade serving an alternate ordering point for take-out.
- Suspended kitchen and dining room: Another "wow" feature of one of the redesigns is the suspended kitchen and dining room that places these areas actually over the drive-thru lanes, solving some of the huge problem drive-thru QSRs experience finding lots and zoning that allows for ample drive-thru access. This design also features covered outdoor seating above the drive-thru entrance. In fact, in this design drive-thru guests receive orders from the suspended kitchen via conveyor belt to each lane's pick-up spot for a touchless delivery point. This triple drive-thru option also features a lane dedicated for delivery drivers.
- Curbside delivery: Advance mobile app-placed orders have dedicated parking spots for curbside delivery.
- Pick-up lockers: Coded food lockers facing the buildings' exteriors will also be available where the kitchen directly places food for retrieval by app-order customers and delivery personnel.
The first of the new design locations will come to form next year in Miami, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean, the company said. The redesigns follow similar mobile customer-oriented reimaginings of the restaurants being built by Sonic and Taco Bell, as previously reported on QSRweb.
"The designs we've created completely integrate restaurant functionality and technology. The restaurant of the tomorrow merges the best functional technology with unique modern design to elevate our Burger King guest experience," Rapha Abreu, RBI global head of design said in the release. "We designed the interior and exterior spaces like we had a blank sheet of paper, designing without preconceived notions of how a Burger King restaurant should look."
Burger King operates more than 18,800 locations in more than 100 countries and U.S. territories.
